Five Lightroom add-ons for Photographers

- Hello once again!My name is Justin Seeleyand this is Creative Quick Tips.Today, I'm going to be showing youfive Adobe add-ons for Lightroom users.You saw a few weeks backI talked a little bit about thePhotoshop add-ons for designers.Well, this is more geared towards photographersbut it can also be for designers as wellbecause Lightroom is quickly becomingone of the most popular photo-editing toolsespecially with its mobile apps and things like that.So, these add-ons are gonna be really greatfor you if you are a Lightroom user.Again, you can find these add-onsat creative.adobe.com/addonsand some of them are free.

Others are paid.I will tell you what those areand I will also tell you what versionsthese work with as well.So, the first one is something calledBlack and White Matte Portrait Lighroom Preset.And so basically this is a presetthat takes your photo from this to this.The sort of faded matte portrait lookis very popular nowadays and in order to achieve ityou have to know how to really tweak those presets.Well, some people might not know exactlywhat those settings are all aboutso this actually helps you do thatand it is a free preset, which can be downloadedand synced into Lightroom.

It works for versions 4.0 and 5.0 on both Mac and Windows.And again, it's calledBlack and White, B&W, Matte Portrait Lightroom Preset.The second one, it does cost $20.It something called Creative Lightroom Presets.It is one of the highest rated in the Adobe add-ons sectionand it's got several downloads and reviews.You can check it out.You can see some of the effectsthat you get here.The before and after-type things that you can see.So, they've got several effects in herethat create various amounts of color saturation,darkening of shadows, brightening things,cross processing, they've got overcast portrait enhancement.

I mean, there's just tons of stuff.You could see here the color portrait presetsare all of these, black and white portrait presets,deeply matte presets, hazy pop presets,detail and clarity, soft pastels,the laundry list goes on, and on, and on,and you get all of these, 183,Lightroom presets total.It's created for Lightroom 4 and 5.It's compatible with RAW JPEG and TIFF images.They are all fully editableand again, Lightroom 4 and 5.It is $20 but 183 presets that doesn't seemlike a whole lot to me.

Next up is something called Photo Upload to Dropbox.So, if you are a person who loves to store your stuffin Dropbox this is a plugin that allows youto upload your photos directly to Dropbox,and it gives you full installation instructions here.You can see the previews of how it works,create an album, and then you go through,select where you want it to, sync it up,and send it off to Dropbox.This $10 but it also comes with a Try button.So, my recommendation would be before you buy itplease, please, please go ahead and try it to make sure.

I don't want you to spend $10 if you don't thinkyou're going to like it.This is available for Lightroom 4 and Lightroom 5,and it is available on both Mac and Windows.The next one is something I really like the name,Instant Hipster (laughs) Presets.This is a really cool onebecause it basically allows you to doInstagram-like things inside of Adobe Lightroom.And so, you can see all of these different onesare named certain things.You might recognize some of themlike NASHVILLE, and KELVIN, and INKWELL.Those are very Instagram names.

You have the INSTAGRAM, INSTAGRAM HIPSTER,all of this stuff is fully editableinside of Lightroom.It works on both RAW and JPEG filesand you do not have to do anythingto make these work.It's basically just point and click.It is $12 and it is for Lightroom 5 and Lightroom 4.Again, Instragram is one of the most popularmobile applications out thereand being able to get that look on your big photos,as I call them, from DSLRs that you load into Lightroom,is very, very cool.The final one is something called WP/LR Sync.

And basically this one allows youto publish your photos to WordPressand keep them in syncincluding your photos in metadata such as titles,captions, tags, alternate text, and all that stuff.So, you set up all the metadatainside of Adobe Lightroom and then it willautomatically sync that to your WordPress site.So, it tells you that this pluginalso features a total syncwhich is a module that helps you link and sync photosdirectly to WordPress and you can now updateyour whole WordPress media librarysimply by uploading from Lightroom.

So, if you are processing photos for your bloginside of Lightroom and you wanna make surethat any edits you make to those photosare translated into your WordPress Media Librarythis is the plugin to do that.It is 100% free.It's a pretty new plugin.It came out in December of 2014.It is available only for Lightroom 5and it is available on Mac and Windows.So, again, these five are theBlack and White Matte Portrait Lightroom Preset,the Creative Lightroom Presets,that's the one with 183,the Photo Upload to Dropbox,Instant Hipster, and WP/LR Sync.

And they are all availablefrom the creative.adobe.com/addons website.So, go check 'em out.See if they don't help you in your Lightroom workflow.

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Author

Updated

11/9/2015

Released

8/5/2013

Join Justin Seeley, lynda.com staff author and design enthusiast, each week for a new 5-minute, self-contained tutorial that you can use to instantly improve your design workflow. This series covers techniques for print, digital, and web design, addressing the tools that creative professionals like you use most. Learn new ways to leverage layer styles and vector shapes in Adobe Photoshop, work more efficiently with text in Illustrator, and embed videos and even tweets in WordPress posts, and much more. Check back each week for a new installment, and a new design hack.